Your trip should be fairly fast and quite comfortable. The trains in Europe are a very convenient way to travel. Be aware of the potential for workers going on strike however.
If you buy your tickets in person and depending on which parts of Barcelona you’re visiting, Estació de França (close to the port, the bottom of Las Ramblas, Drassanes, Old Town, Santa María del Mar…) is a muuuuuuch better choice than Sants. There are a lot less travellers, so the people in the booths have time to be helpful and polite.
You will still be taking the train from Sants.
Budget airlines- and even non budget are shockers for wringing the cash out of you.
I have not travelled the route you are doing but have done a few in Europe and found the trips extremely pleasant and relatively cheap.
One thing you may need to be aware of- and I have no idea of your age or what you will be carrying- is that the luggage area may be rather restricted and even entry to the carriage difficult if you have a heavy suitcase. Travelling from Sticholm to Copenhagen I was so grateful to some young guy- he looked like Hagar- who saw me struggling getting the heavy suitcase to an overhead rack. He just picked it up and placed it in one moment.
One other thing you need to be aware of- keep an eye on them at stops. People can leave the carriage and “mistakenly” take your luggage.
We went from Warsaw to Krakow and were the only ones in First Class. It was fantastic although a relatively short trip. Service was good.
Ooh, good catch. I use the trainline website all the time for the UK and it doesn’t give coach options for trips here. I thought that was a bit too cheap.
Ryanair no longer even allow you to bring normal hand luggage on for free, just a tiny handbag. The amount of extra charges is getting almost comical. Also the cheap airlines don’t take you to the centre, like the train, nor do they fly to the main airport. In fact the ‘Paris’ airport might be over an hour’s bus ride away from actual Paris…
The €60 flight tickets are the ones where you can only bring hand luggage; adding one suitcase beforehand raises the price, doing so in the airport may need assistance from Airport Health Services. Train conductors reserve the right to grumble at people traveling with more weight in luggage than on their own bodies, but there are no luggage charges.
And if it’s Ryanair, their “BCN” airports aren’t even in the same province; one of the places they call Barcelona is over 2h away. easyjet and vueling fly from BCN’s real, actual, can get there on the subway, airport.
Nava, frequent flyer BCN-anywhere.
Depending on the day, I can find Air France (standard economy - no extra fees for luggage) and Iberia (also standard economy) for €70 and under, BCN to CDG. (The Ryanair tickets from PGF to Orly go as low as €17. But you probably would have to do everything perfectly and then stand for the two hour flight to get that price.)
I’m not saying flying is better, just that it’s an option.
I’m also really interested in blablacar - which seems to be Uber for road trips. You could get there in a time comparable to the train, see the scenery, and meet a friend for life (or have a really good story to tell about your trip).
Have you flown with the miserly buggers in the last month? Since November 1st, your free ‘hand luggage’ is now a pathetic 40cm x 20 cm x 25 cm and must fit under the seat in front. €25 extra to bring normal hand luggage that’s free everywhere else, and you’re not allowed it on board for that price, you have to pay for ‘priority’.
Blablacar works well on popular routes. I have done several trips between London and Paris. The big advantage is that it is cheap and you can arrange something just a day or so before you want to travel. You get to see the kind of car the driver has and ask questions beforehand.
The downside is you may have to travel across a city to meeting point convenience for the driver. It is not a taxi service. Also a driver saves the most money by having a full car. This can get rather cramped on a long journey and if people turn up with lots of baggage it may not fit in the car. I’ve noticed that some drivers seem to be running an unofficial bus service on some routes, cramming a dozen backpackers into a minibus. If you want to go a less popular route then you might find the drivers are few and far between.
My experiences were all pretty good. Nice chat a driver delivering a sports car to Paris and he helped me buy a metro ticket to get into town.
As far as the trains are concerned, there are bargains to be had buying second hand train tickets. This is quite common in France and there are websites for this purpose. Trains a very good in France, far safer than the roads and very fast…when the drivers are not on strike, that is.
I’ve used the websites and they seem to work. You have to arrange a meeting with the seller. It is a bit like a spy movie. ‘I will meet you under the Eiffel Tower at 3pm. I will be wearing a brown hat and carrying a copy ‘Le Figaro’. Please have the money ready and I will pass you the ticket’. 
It can be a bit hit and miss. You have to send texts back and forth a bit to establish whether someone is going to be reliable.
Actually, last time I did this, it was all very Millennial. I did an international bank transfer and received an E-ticket in return. Loaded it onto my smartphone E-wallet. I waved this at the electronic reader that controls the barriers to the Paris-London Eurostar train and got through untroubled by anyone from the train company. Strictly speaking the tickets are not transferable but the train companies don’t seem to check, after all they have already been paid.
This site is in English and conveniently seems to gather all the various transport options together.
It is a lot of fun travelling around Europe like this. A smartphone with Google translate is VERY useful.
I’ve never been to Paris before and just now, out of curiosity, compared the locations of Gare de Lyon train station and de Gualle airport. Gare de Lyon looks to be in a very convenient spot (NOTE: looking at it as someone who does not actually know the city), whereas de Gaulle, just as you suggested, is way on the outskirts.
In fact, just looking at a map I was a little distressed at the idea of the airport actually being troublesomely remote but I just mapped out a route from Gare de Lyon to de Gaulle and it’s actually almost the exact same distance as between LAX and downtown Los Angeles. Now that I’ve got something familiar to compare it to, I realize it’s actually not so bad.
I still am leaning towards taking the train from Barcelona to Paris but I will still need the airport to get from Paris to Cork.
But the chunnel!
(no it doesn’t end up in Cork, but you can figure something out from there. Also - they’re having cyber week discounts if you get tickets now.)
Well… I should have listened to you guys about booking far in advance!
It’s just under a month until my trip and I’ve got the train and hotels booked. Yay!
Booking this late, trainline.eu had NOTHING available. (Should that be expected or is this weird?)
Seat 61 also suggested booking through loco2.com but this also had NOTHING available.
Another Seat 61 suggestion for booking was www.raileurope.com. This site DID have bookings available. It was more expensive than expectations I had from this Thread but I assume that is because I waited so long (You guys warned me!!!).
I’ve got a window seat from Barcelona Sants to Paris Gare de Lyon.
It’ll be about a 6 and a half hour trip. The First Class ticket was not much more than the regular fare. I have no idea what First Class gets me but since the price difference was minimal I decided to go for it.
Barcelona Sants is about just over a mile from my hotel.
Gare de Lyon is only a quater mile from my hotel in Paris.
The problem is that companies like Ryan air won’t land you at Charles de Gaulle but rather at Beauvais airport (conveniently called Paris-Beauvais so that it will look like its near Paris), which is about one hundred kilometers away.
Nowadays, you should even be wary of train tickets too, in fact. Railroad companies have begun to offer too “low cost” train rides, at very low prices, but with limitations on luggage, extra fees and sometimes also using train stations situated in remote suburbs, exactly like the airways companies they’re imitating.
The sites you mention are presumably ticket resellers, having only a limited number of tickets on sale. Rail Europe is a bit different : it’s a subsidiary of European railway companies (in fact, mostly of the French SNCF) that resells their tickets in the USA at, notoriously, a significant premium. At least it used to be so. Maybe they’re taking a smaller cut nowadays, but I would guess not.
Not helpful for you now, but the best is generally to buy tickets directly from the train companies (the Spanish RENFE in this case). But I know that the French SNCF at least made, on purpose, difficult to buy tickets directly from them when you’re in the USA, so that you’ll buy the costlier Rail Europe tickets instead. Couldn’t say if the RENFE does the same. The trick to go around this, if I remember correctly, used to be that you didn’t state you were a US resident when buying the tickets from the SNCF, and asked to pick them up at the train station. Then you’d get normal prices and also benefit from possible rebates if there were any.
I checked, and Barcelona-Paris tickets are sold by the RENFE and SNCF for between € 130 and € 230 depending on the day and time. And there’s no availability problem, there are tickets available for later this morning, for instance, and for tomorrow, and all the other days (of course, better safe than sorry, not saying that you should risk buying your tickets at the very last moment).
Booking in advance used to be good for lower ticket prices, but it’s not necessarily true anymore. For this too they’re imitating airways, and ticket prices are determined by computers and change all the time. I tend to buy my tickets at the last moment, and you just never know. You can go drink a coffee and when you come back the price is three times higher of two times lower. Especially wild when there are few seats left (in both directions, strangely enough). At least true in France. Other countries might still have a more traditional approach. Prices seem stabler in Italy, the only other country where I regularly ride trains. At least, you know what you will pay when you buy in advance, even if it doesn’t end up being a particularly good deal.
I’m about to start flying with them again, albeit as little as possible (it’s the only reasonable travel time from my current location to Barcelona). The “must fit under the seat in front of you” thing, fortunately I didn’t read it while I was drinking, because in my last flights I specifically wasn’t allowed to put my pack under the seats in front of me (not an exit row, just not allowed period). When I pointed out that other companies require computer bags to go there (it makes for easier overhead packing, faster boarding and deboarding, and avoids trouble with similar bags), the stewardess asked if I was questioning her authority. Oooo-k…
Italy just delivered a well-earned backhand for thievery
Good! I travelled from Gatwick to Bari with easyJet early January. The passengers with small trolley cabin bags had to leave them on a cart next to the plane, to be put in the hold with no extra charge. I carried my large backpack on board and put it into the (relatively empty) overhead storage.
I did this once in Paris for a train to Zurich; the issue then was that when I tried to pick up the ticket out of the vending machine at the Gare de l’Est, I couldn’t because my credit card didn’t have a chip. So I had to wait in a longish line to pick it up, which was kind of nerve-wracking because I was running out of time. But that was going on 15 years ago now, and the U.S. actually gives people chip cards now, and the whole system may be different for all I know. And I haven’t taken RENFE since there was commonly available Internet, so no idea about that. But make sure you leave yourself enough time for any kind of weirdness at the train station.
But I have to say that I detest the concept of charging different prices for things, especially things bought online, based on where you live.